Abstract
The Handling Bullying Questionnaire (HBQ) is a psychometric survey instrument developed by educational psychologist Ken Rigby and counselor educator Sheri Bauman to assess how school personnel—specifically classroom teachers, school counselors, and educational administrators—respond to hypothetical or observed incidents of peer bullying. Comprising 22 self-report items evaluated on a 5-point Likert-type response format ranging from 1 (I definitely would not) to 5 (I definitely would), the HBQ assesses five distinct strategic orientations: (1) Working with the Victim, (2) Working with the Bully, (3) Ignoring the Incident, (4) Enlisting Other Adults, and (5) Disciplining the Bully.
Psychometric evaluations, most notably conducted across extensive samples of educators and mental health professionals in Australia, the United States, and Europe (e.g., Bauman, Rigby, & Hoppa, 2008), demonstrate solid structural validity through exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. Internal consistency reliability estimates (Cronbach’s alpha) across empirical studies demonstrate acceptable to good values for most subscales: Working with the Victim (α = .75), Ignoring the Incident (α = .70), Working with the Bully (α = .69), and Enlisting Other Adults (α = .63). The Disciplining the Bully dimension typically demonstrates modest internal consistency (α = .45 to .56), reflecting the complex and multifaceted nature of punitive versus non-punitive disciplinary actions in educational environments. The HBQ serves as a critical diagnostic and research instrument in developmental psychology, educational administration, and school counseling, guiding professional development interventions, evaluating anti-bullying policy compliance, and elucidating educator intervention patterns that mitigate or exacerbate peer victimization.
Keywords
Handling Bullying Questionnaire, HBQ, school bullying, teacher intervention, school counseling, peer victimization, restorative practices, disciplinary sanctions, school psychology, educational assessment
Authors
The Handling Bullying Questionnaire was designed and validated through a collaborative scholarly partnership led by two internationally recognized authorities in school-based violence prevention:
- Ken Rigby, Ph.D.: Adjunct Professor of Education at the University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia. A pioneering researcher in school bullying, Dr. Rigby has authored seminal books and policy guidelines on peer victimization, restorative justice in schools, and the Method of Shared Concern.
- Sheri Bauman, Ph.D.: Professor of Counseling and Mental Health Practice in the College of Education at the University of Arizona, Tucson, United States. Dr. Bauman specializes in school counselor interventions, cyberbullying dynamics, peer harassment, and school climate diagnostics.
- Kathleen Hoppa, M.A.: Educational researcher and psychometric collaborator at the University of Arizona, contributing extensively to the structural validation and comparative cross-national analyses of the instrument (Bauman, Rigby, & Hoppa, 2008).
Purpose
The primary purpose of the Handling Bullying Questionnaire (HBQ) is to systematically measure, categorize, and analyze the behavioral choices, intervention preferences, and professional strategies that educators, school counselors, and administrators report they would enact when confronted with instances of school bullying. Although school-wide anti-bullying policies often mandate immediate intervention, empirical literature reveals substantial heterogeneity in how individual educators respond to peer victimization. Some educators rely on traditional retributive discipline, others adopt restorative and supportive problem-solving, some mobilize institutional support networks, and some engage in non-intervention or dismissive behaviors.
Understanding these intervention patterns is critical because teacher and staff behavior functions as a primary determinant of whether school-based anti-bullying programs succeed or fail. When school personnel dismiss bullying, minimize its severity, or place the burden of resolution entirely upon the victim, targeted students experience compounded psychological trauma, increased school absenteeism, and elevated risks for clinical depression and anxiety. Conversely, interventions grounded in structured mediation, non-punitive restorative dialogue, or coordinated systemic actions involving multi-disciplinary staff yield improved outcomes in terms of social climate and safety perceptions.
In clinical, educational, and research environments, the HBQ fulfills several critical functions:
- Training Needs Assessment: The scale enables school districts and university teacher-preparation programs to identify prevailing mindsets and deficits in educators’ strategic toolkits prior to conducting targeted professional development.
- Policy Evaluation and Compliance: Institutional leadership can utilize the HBQ to monitor whether school staff practices align with district, state, or national safe-school mandates that emphasize restorative practices or multidisciplinary referral pathways over unilateral punitive sanctions.
- Cross-Professional Comparative Inquiries: The instrument facilitates empirical comparisons between distinct professional groups within schools—such as classroom teachers, school counselors, school social workers, and school administrators—revealing divergent role expectations and intervention philosophies.
- Cross-National and Cross-Cultural Research: The HBQ provides a standardized operational framework to assess how legal environments, cultural individualism/collectivism, and pedagogical training programs across continents influence staff willingness to intervene and preferred management strategies.
Psychological Construct
The construct assessed by the Handling Bullying Questionnaire is multidimensional, capturing the tactical and interpersonal responses chosen by school staff in managing relational aggression, verbal abuse, cyber harassment, and physical bullying among youth. The instrument measures five primary empirical dimensions:
1. Working with the Victim
This subscale captures strategies that focus directly on empowering, advising, or coaching the victimized student. Rather than solely shielding the student passively, items in this dimension evaluate whether educators encourage assertiveness, self-advocacy, and emotional resilience. Examples include encouraging the victim to stand up to the bully, suggesting that the victim act more assertively, and advising the victim to instruct the perpetrator to “back off.” While assertiveness training can be beneficial within broader protective frameworks, psychometric analyses also investigate whether this strategy inadvertently verges on victim-blaming if unaccompanied by systemic staff protection.
2. Working with the Bully
This dimension operationalizes restorative, cognitive-behavioral, and humanistic interventions aimed at reforming the perpetrator’s conduct through empathy-building, self-regulation, and collaborative problem-solving. Grounded in restorative justice philosophies, this approach avoids primary reliance on sanctions. Items evaluate actions such as sharing concern with the bully about the impact on the victim, discussing choices and alternatives to improve the interpersonal situation, engaging the perpetrator in finding alternative constructive activities, and facilitating interventions to bolster the perpetrator’s self-esteem.
3. Ignoring the Incident
This construct assesses passive non-intervention, trivialization, and abdication of professional supervisory responsibility. Educators high on this dimension express an inclination to minimize the psychological severity of peer abuse, believing students should settle disputes without adult involvement. Items capture behaviors such as treating the matter lightly, letting the students sort it out themselves, telling students to “grow up,” or ignoring the situation entirely. This dimension represents an established risk factor in school climates, strongly associated with bystander passivity and sustained victimization.
4. Enlisting Other Adults
This subscale measures multi-tiered and systemic collaboration, gauging the degree to which school personnel consult, refer, or partner with other professional and domestic stakeholders. It recognizes that chronic peer harassment often exceeds the management capacity of a single classroom teacher. Items measure actions such as conferring with teaching colleagues, involving specialized school mental health professionals (such as school counselors or social workers), notifying school administrators (e.g., principals or deans), and initiating contact with the parents or legal guardians of the students involved.
5. Disciplining the Bully
This dimension reflects traditional, authoritarian, and retributive behavioral management strategies focused on deterrence, formal censure, and structural penalties. It assesses whether educators believe peer aggression requires clear, direct consequences to uphold institutional zero-tolerance standards. Representative items evaluate insisting that the bully “cut it out,” making it unequivocal that aggressive behaviors will not be tolerated, and ensuring that suitable formal punishments are administered.
Theoretical Framework
The Handling Bullying Questionnaire is theoretically situated at the intersection of social-ecological systems theory (Bronfenbrenner, 1979) and contemporary criminology frameworks differentiating retributive discipline from restorative justice (Braithwaite, 1989).
1. Bronfenbrenner’s Socio-Ecological Paradigm
Bullying is no longer conceptualized as an isolated dyadic interaction between an aggressive child and a vulnerable peer; rather, modern developmental psychopathology frames it as a socio-ecological phenomenon maintained across microsystemic and mesosystemic environments. Within the school microsystem, adult personnel serve as proximal agents who define behavioral norms, enforce moral boundaries, and model social problem-solving. When teachers intervene decisively and constructively, they alter the peer ecology, disrupting the social architecture that rewards aggressive dominance. When teachers display apathy or dismissive attitudes (as measured by the HBQ’s Ignoring the Incident subscale), they inadvertently communicate social approval or institutional impotence, exacerbating peer bystander apathy.
2. Restorative Practices vs. Retributive Penology
A second foundational axis is John Braithwaite’s theory of reintegrative shaming versus disintegrative punishment, alongside Anatol Pikas’s Method of Shared Concern (Rigby, 2011). Retributive educational practices emphasize structural consequences (suspension, detention, formal reprimand) intended to deter future violations. However, empirical literature illustrates that zero-tolerance and purely punitive approaches often trigger secondary deviance, marginalization, and covert hostility. In contrast, the HBQ’s Working with the Bully dimension is rooted in restorative frameworks, which prioritize eliciting genuine cognitive empathy, highlighting the consequences of actions on the victim, and integrating the perpetrator into constructing sustainable relational solutions.
3. Bystander Intervention and Latané & Darley’s Cognitive Framework
The HBQ aligns conceptually with the classic cognitive-decision model of bystander intervention proposed by Latané and Darley (1970). To intervene effectively, an educator must sequentially: (a) notice that an event is occurring, (b) interpret the peer interaction as abusive rather than benign rough-and-tumble play, (c) accept personal professional responsibility to intervene rather than diffusing responsibility to other staff, (d) determine the specific behavioral strategy required (e.g., restorative dialogue, disciplinary sanction, administrative referral), and (e) execute the behavior. The HBQ explicitly quantifies the operationalization of steps (c) and (d), capturing both the willingness to accept responsibility and the preferred tactical pathway.
Validity
The construct, convergent, and discriminant validity of the Handling Bullying Questionnaire has been extensively established across diverse educational cohorts:
Content and Construct Validity
The original item pool was developed through extensive qualitative interviews and focus groups conducted with primary and secondary educators, school psychologists, and academic anti-bullying authorities in Australia (Rigby, 2006). Items were iteratively refined to mirror authentic scenarios and pragmatic choices faced in school environments. Subsequent psychometric cross-validation in the United States by Bauman, Rigby, and Hoppa (2008) verified that the items meaningfully differentiate among educators based on professional roles, years of pedagogical experience, and underlying philosophical attitudes toward school climate.
Convergent and Criterion Validity
Empirical studies demonstrate significant convergent correlations between HBQ subscales and validated psychological measures of teacher self-efficacy, empathy, and professional role orientation:
- Empathy and Compassion: Scores on Working with the Bully and Working with the Victim correlate positively with measures of adult interpersonal empathy and perspective-taking (Davis’s Interpersonal Reactivity Index).
- Educator Self-Efficacy: Teachers with elevated personal teaching efficacy scores demonstrate significantly lower scores on Ignoring the Incident and higher scores on active problem-solving dimensions.
- School Climate Measures: In schools where aggregate staff scores on Enlisting Other Adults and Working with the Bully are high, independent student-report surveys demonstrate higher perceived school safety and increased student willingness to report peer harassment.
Discriminant Validity
The HBQ demonstrates marked discriminant validity between distinct professional cohorts. In the multi-group investigations conducted by Bauman et al. (2008), school counselors scored significantly higher than regular classroom teachers on Working with the Bully and Working with the Victim, whereas classroom teachers scored higher on Disciplining the Bully and Enlisting Other Adults (specifically referring matters to administrators). Furthermore, the Ignoring the Incident subscale demonstrates strong negative orthogonal divergence from all active intervention subscales, confirming that non-intervention is psychometrically distinct from varied forms of active handling.
Reliability
The internal consistency of the HBQ subscales has been evaluated across multiple international samples. Psychometric investigations, most notably the landmark study by Bauman, Rigby, and Hoppa (2008) involving 738 American educators and school counselors, report the following internal consistency values (Cronbach’s α):
- Working with the Victim: α = .75 (demonstrating acceptable to strong internal consistency across 4 items).
- Ignoring the Incident: α = .70 (demonstrating solid internal reliability for a 4-item passive non-intervention scale).
- Working with the Bully: α = .69 (bordering the .70 threshold, demonstrating adequate coherence for exploratory and diagnostic field research across 5 items).
- Enlisting Other Adults: α = .63 (acceptable for a heterogeneous index representing distinct collaborative channels, such as parents, counselors, and administrative leaders across 4 items).
- Disciplining the Bully: α = .45 to .56 (reflecting lower internal consistency across 5 items).
The comparatively lower Cronbach’s alpha observed for the Disciplining the Bully subscale has received extensive psychometric attention in the literature. Researchers (e.g., Rigby & Bauman, 2010) have noted that punitive disciplinary behavior in schools is multidimensional and often inconsistent: some educators utilize verbal reprimands (e.g., telling the bully to “cut it out”) without pursuing formal, severe administrative penalties (e.g., out-of-school suspensions or external parent summonses). Consequently, these items tap into varying levels of punitive severity that do not always co-vary linearly across respondents, yielding lower standard internal consistency coefficients while maintaining critical ecological and face validity.
Factor Analysis
Structural evaluations of the HBQ have historically employed exploratory factor analysis (EFA) with principal axis factoring and oblique (Promax or Oblimin) rotations, given the expected theoretical correlations among intervention modalities. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) has subsequently been applied to evaluate the structural integrity of the 5-factor model across cross-cultural cohorts.
Exploratory Factor Structure
Initial factor extractions performed by Rigby (2006) and Bauman et al. (2008) revealed a robust five-factor solution accounting for approximately 48% to 54% of the total cumulative variance in educator responses. Items loaded consistently on their hypothesized latent factors, with primary factor loadings generally exceeding .45 and minimal secondary cross-loadings:
- Factor 1 (Working with the Victim): Items 6, 11, 17, and 22 load cleanly, capturing staff encouragement of victim assertiveness and behavioral coping.
- Factor 2 (Working with the Bully): Items 5, 9, 12, 19, and 21 load onto this restorative dimension, capturing dialogue, option-generation, and self-esteem enhancement.
- Factor 3 (Ignoring the Incident): Items 2, 8, 10, 16, and 18 manifest strong positive loadings (ranging from .51 to .74) on passive neglect and dismissal.
- Factor 4 (Enlisting Other Adults): Items 4, 13, 14, 15, and 20 capture referrals to colleagues, administrators, mental health counselors, and parent notification.
- Factor 5 (Disciplining the Bully): Items 1, 3, and 7 load together, reflecting formal behavioral prohibition and sanctioning.
Confirmatory Model Fit
In structural equation modeling assessments testing the hypothesized five-factor configuration against single-factor (general willingness to intervene) and three-factor (active-punitive vs. active-restorative vs. passive) alternative models, the five-factor model consistently demonstrates superior fit to empirical data. Standard model fit indices reported across validation literature include: comparative fit index (CFI) values between .90 and .93, Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI) values between .88 and .91, and root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) values ranging from .048 to .062 (with 90% confidence intervals well within the acceptable psychometric boundary of ≤ .08).
Instrument / Measurement Tool
The Handling Bullying Questionnaire is structured as follows:
- Format: Standardized self-report pencil-and-paper or digital questionnaire. Often preceded by a standardized hypothetical vignette depicting an ambiguous or overt bullying incident to anchor participant responses, or administered as a general behavioral disposition inventory.
- Target Population: In-service school teachers, pre-service teacher candidates, school counselors, school social workers, school psychologists, and primary/secondary school administrators.
- Item Count: 22 individual behavioral response items.
- Response Scale: 5-point Likert scale formatted with the following anchors:
- (5) I definitely would
- (4) I probably would
- (3) I’m unsure
- (2) I probably would not
- (1) I definitely would not
- Subscale Item Groupings:
- Working with the Victim: Items 6, 11, 17, 22
- Working with the Bully: Items 5, 9, 12, 19, 21
- Ignoring the Incident: Items 2, 8, 10, 16, 18
- Enlisting Other Adults: Items 4, 13, 14, 15, 20
- Disciplining the Bully: Items 1, 3, 7
- Scoring Procedures: Subscale composite scores are calculated by averaging the response numerical values corresponding to the constituent items of each dimension (yielding subscale mean scores ranging from 1.00 to 5.00). High scores reflect a strong predisposition toward that behavioral orientation. A global composite is not typically recommended, as the subscales represent qualitative, non-linear strategic orientations rather than a single continuous trait.
- Administration Time: Approximately 8 to 12 minutes.
Permissions & Fee and Test Year
The Handling Bullying Questionnaire was developed and published by Dr. Ken Rigby in 2006, with primary empirical validation published in collaboration with Dr. Sheri Bauman in 2007 and 2008. The instrument is generally made accessible for scholarly, non-profit academic research, university dissertations, and school-district internal evaluations at no financial cost, provided full academic attribution is cited in all resulting reports and publications. Researchers wishing to utilize the HBQ are advised to access the official author repository or contact Dr. Ken Rigby directly through his academic portal at the University of South Australia.
References
- Bauman, S., Rigby, K., & Hoppa, K. (2008). US teachers’ and school counsellors’ strategies for handling school bullying incidents. Educational Psychology, 28(7), 837–856. https://doi.org/10.1080/01443410802379085
- Braithwaite, J. (1989). Crime, shame and reintegration. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511804618
- Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The ecology of human development: Experiments by nature and design. Harvard University Press.
- Latané, B., & Darley, J. M. (1970). The unresponsive bystander: Why doesn’t he help? Appleton-Century-Crofts.
- Rigby, K. (2006). Handling Bullying Questionnaire. Retrieved from http://www.kenrigby.net/
- Rigby, K. (2011). The Method of Shared Concern: A positive approach to bullying in schools. Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) Press.
- Rigby, K., & Bauman, S. (2007). What teachers think should be done about cases of bullying. Professional Educator, 6(4), 26–30.
- Rigby, K., & Bauman, S. (2010). How school personnel tackle cases of bullying: A critical examination. In S. R. Jimerson, S. M. Swearer, & D. L. Espelage (Eds.), The International Handbook of School Bullying (pp. 455–468). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203864968